Sunday, June 5, 2016

AT&T is expanding its 5G lab trial work in collaboration with Nokia. Specifically, 5G system and software architecture lab work is now underway at AT&T facilities in Middletown, N.J., Atlanta, Ga. and San Ramon, California. Nokia is supplying test equipment for a variety of 5G technology building blocks and features, including sub-6Hz and mmWave spectrum use, low latency, advanced beamforming and very high throughput.

"We've seen great results in our 5G lab trials, including reaching speeds above 10 gigabits per second in early tests with Ericsson," said Tom Keathley, senior vice president – wireless network architecture and design, AT&T. "Nokia is joining to help us test millimeter wave (mmWave), which we expect to play a key role in 5G development and deployment. The work coming out of AT&T Labs will pave the way toward future international 5G standards and allow us to deliver these fast 5G speeds and network performance across the U.S."

AT&T noted that early latency performance tests have shown positive signs for future consumer experiences, such as self-driving cars.

In the coming months, the carrier expects to conduct outdoor 5G wireless connectivity trials to fixed locations in cities such as Austin, Texas and Middletown, N.J.

AT&T will begin 5G trials this year. The first lab test with Ericsson and Intel will begin in Q2, followed by outdoor trials over the summer. 5G field trials to fixed locations in Austin will begin before the end of this year.

AT&T expects 5G to deliver speeds 10-100 times faster than today’s average 4G LTE connections. Customers will see speeds measured in gigabits per second, not megabits. 5G latency is expected to be in the range of 1 to 5 milliseconds.

“New experiences like virtual reality, self-driving cars, robotics, smart cities and more are about to test networks like never before,” said John Donovan, Chief Strategy Officer and Group President, AT&T Technology and Operations.

“These technologies will be immersive, pervasive and responsive to customers. 5G will help make them a reality. 5G will reach its full potential because we will build it on a software-centric architecture that can adapt quickly to new demands and give customers more control of their network services. Our approach is simple – deliver a unified experience built with 5G, software-defined networking (SDN), Big Data, security and open source software.”

AT&T said technologies such as millimeter waves, NFV, and SDN will be among the key ingredients for future 5G experiences. AT&T Labs has been working on these technologies for years and has filed dozens of patents connected with them.

Some additional notes:

Data traffic on AT&T’s wireless network grew more than 150,000% from 2007 through 2015, driven largely by video.

More than 60% of the data traffic on the AT&T network was video in 2015.

AT&T already has 14 million wireless customers on its virtualized network and will millions more this year.

The Tier III data center consists of 20 rooms of 500 m2 each. The building is supported by a 30-megawatt energy capacity and 25 generators of 2500 KVA each. Turkcell said its new facility has earned a Leed Gold certificate - a mark of sustainability and energy efficiency - and has been designed to withstand earthquakes of magnitudes of up to 9.0 on the Richter scale.

Turkcell noted that in addition to the data traffic of Turkey, 50% of the data traffic to Georgia, Iraq and Iran goes through its network. Turkcell now aims to expand its international collaborations into providing cloud services for global content companies and act as a node for international data traffic.

“As the global landscape of industrial production shifts to an ICT-focused mode with Industry 4.0, storing data safely and securely , and attaining the ability to analyze it become essential. With this new data center, we are providing the infrastructure for Turkey-based companies to benefit from these capabilities using the state-of-the-art technology at the highest global standards.” said Kaan Terzioglu, CEO of Turkcell. “With our technology leadership in Turkey and international collaborations, we will establish a new Silk Road of information on fiber, and contribute to raising the profile of our country as a regional hub of information.”

Turkcell also announced plans to open two new data centers in Ankara and Izmir, the second and the third largest cities of Turkey, in the coming 18 months. Upon completion of these two data centers, Turkcell will have 107,000 m2 of data center area.

The second generation ARM processor from Cavium, which offers a number of on-board accelerators and advanced capabilities, packs up to 54 cores, enabling it to deliver two to three times the performance across a wide range of standard benchmarks and applications compared to ThunderX. It is built in 14nm FinFET process and is compliant with ARMv8.2 architecture as well as ARM's Server Base System Architecture (SBSA) standard.

Key ThunderX2 features will include:

2nd generation of full custom Cavium ARM core: 2.4 to 2.8GHz in normal mode, Up to 3 GHz in Turbo mode; > 2X single thread performance compared to ThunderX.

"ThunderX2 combines our next generation core that will deliver significantly higher single thread performance with next generation IO and hardware accelerators to provide a compelling value proposition for the server market and greatly expand the serviceable server TAM," said Syed Ali, President and CEO of Cavium. "ThunderX2 will enable flexible, scalable and fully optimizable servers for next generation software defined data centers."

Cavium unveiled its OCTEON TX family, a line of 64-bit ARM based SOCs for control plane and data plane applications in networking, security, and storage.

The OCTEON TX combines Cavium's data plane architecture with its optimized ARMv8.1 cores (the company continues to produce its OCTEON III processors, which are based on MIPS).

The new processors expand the addressability of Cavium’s embedded products into control plane application areas within enterprise, service provider, data center networking and storage that need support of extensive software ecosystem and virtualization features. This product line is also optimized to run multiple concurrent data and control planes simultaneously for security and router appliances, NFV and SDN infrastructure, service provider CPE, wireless transport, NAS, storage controllers, IOT gateways, printer and industrial applications.

Cavium said the control planes of next gen platforms will need to run commercial software distributions and operating systems (e.g., RHEL, Canonical and Java SE), support open source applications (e.g., OpenStack, OpenFlow and Quagga), launch services dynamically and run customer specific services. Multiple types of high performance data plane applications also need to be supported for firewall, content delivery, routing, and traffic management. While current OCTEON SOCs are used in applications for data plane as well as control plane with embedded software, control plane applications requiring wider software ecosystem and support traditionally have been addressed by the x86 architecture. The ARM architecture is able to service these critical needs.

Ixia will conduct the first public demonstration of its test system running 400GbE with RS-544 Forward Error Correction (FEC) at this week's Interop Tokyo 2016.

RS-544 FEC is a digital signal processing technique used to enhance data reliability. It does this by introducing error correcting code that is calculated prior to data transmission. The IEEE P802.3bs Task Force defines two FEC engines that are required for the electrical interface that supports 400GbE.

“2.5GbE network ports are being widely deployed in campus environments. This is a prime time for a disruptive, cost-effective 2.5GbE access solution with 40GbE uplinks or stacking,” said Michael Zimmerman, Vice President and General Manager, Connectivity, Storage and Infrastructure (CSI) Business Unit at Marvell Semiconductor, Inc.